Salman Rushdie Midnight's children Salman Rushdie Midnight's ...

ing extremely hard. Soon the cracks will be wide enough for them to escape…
By the way: some time around the end of 1956, in all probability, the singe
r and cuckold Wee Willie Winkie also met his death.
Love in Bombay
During Ramzan, the month of fasting, we went to the movies as often as we
could. After being shaken awake at five a.m. by my mother's assiduous hand
; after pre dawn breakfasts of melon and sugared lime water, and especiall
y on Sunday mornings, the Brass Monkey and I took it in turns (or sometime
s called out in unison) to remind Amina: 'The ten thirty in the morning sh
ow! It's Metro Cub Club day, Amma, pleeeese!' Then the drive in the Rover
to the cinema where we would taste neither Coca Cola nor potato crisps, ne
ither Kwality ice cream nor samosas in greasy paper; but at least there wa
s air conditioning, and Cub Club badges pinned to our clothes, and competi
tions, and birthday announcements made by a compere with an inadequate mou
stache; and finally, the film, after the trailers with their introductory
titles, 'Next Attraction' and 'Coming Soon', and the cartoon ('In A Moment
, The Big Film; But First… !'): Quentin Durward, perhaps, or Scaramouche.
'Swashbuckling!' we'd say to one another afterwards, playing movie critic;
and, 'A rumbustious, bawdy romp!' although we were ignorant of swashbuckl
es and bawdiness. There was not much praying in our family (except on Eid
ul Fitr, when my father took me to the Friday mosque to celebrate the holi
day by tying a handkerchief around my head and pressing my forehead to the
ground)… but we were always willing to fast, because we liked the cinema.
Evie Burns and I agreed: the world's greatest movie star was Robert Taylor.
I also liked Jay Silverheels as Tonto; but his kemo sabay, Clayton Moore,
was too fat for the Lone Ranger, in my view.
Evelyn Lilith Burns arrived on New Year's Day, 1957, to take up residence
with her widower father in an apartment in one of the two squat, ugly conc
rete blocks which had grown up, almost without pur noticing them, on the l
ower reaches of our hillock, and which were oddly segregated: Americans an
d other foreigners lived (like Evie) in Noor Ville; arriviste Indian succe
ss stories ended up in Laxmi Vilas. From the heights of Methwold's Estate,
we looked down on them all, on white and brown alike; but nobody ever loo
ked down on Evie Burns except once. Only once did anyone get on top of her.
Before I climbed into my first pair of long pants, I fell in love with Evie;
but love was a curious, chain reactive thing that year. To save time, I shall
place all of us in the same row at the Metro cinema; Robert Taylor is mirror
ed in our eyes as we sit in flickering trances and also in symbolic sequence:
Saleem Sinai is sitting next to and in love with Evie Burns who is sitting n
ext to and in love with Sonny